


Glorious

by m3aculpa



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen, Murder, Pre-Canon, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-24
Updated: 2010-09-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 15:30:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m3aculpa/pseuds/m3aculpa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Methos remembered the head he'd taken five thousand years before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glorious

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Glorious  
>  **Fandom:** Highlander: The Series **  
> Rating:** Soft R (mostly to be on the safe side)  
>  **Characters/Pairings:** Methos, OC, mentions of Joe  
>  **Warnings:** Killing  
>  **Word count:** 734  
>  **Summary** : Methos remembered the head he'd taken five thousand years before.  
>  **a/n:** This is what happens when I am dragged into a maraton of Highlander films as well as a maraton of the first season of X-files (and get the episode about the Jersey Devil stuck in my head).

Five thousand years, give or take. And before that everything starts to blur.  
   
But he remembers her. God, how he remembers her! He can’t remember the land where they were. Only that it was warm and dry with sand that reached as far as he could see. It might have been somewhere in Egypt. He found her in a cave. Or rather he just happened to pass by the cave and stumbled across her.  
   
He felt that buzz. That warning signal of another immortal near. That’s his first clear memory; feeling that buzz and being badly startled by it. He must have known what it meant, because he drew his blade. He was watchful. Wary. His aim even then had been to survive.  
   
She came rushing out from the cave. Nude as the day she was born. Her body was shorter than his and her face… he had no references to describe it then, but today he knows it was almost like a monkey’s. Her hair was black and wild grown. Even the hair covering her genitals was a tangled mess. She was the most terrifying sight he’d ever seen. She was also the most beautiful.  
   
She was already old by then. Older than he could imagine. She had no sense, no reason; her primitive brain had been driven insane by the centuries she had lived. She felt that buzz and was driven berserk. She grabbed him before he could raise his blade. His fingers were numb from fear and he barely struggled. She slammed his head into the ground. Over and over until he died.  
   
Then he came back. She made a whining, terrified, enraged sound and slammed him into the stones so that his spine cracked. She killed him so many times. But she didn’t have sense to behead him, or she simply didn’t know that she could only kill him permanently that way. He might have been the first one she’d seen in years, centuries, _millennia_.  
   
He was driven out of his mind with terror when he landed a kick that sent her stumbling backwards. It was random luck, otherwise he would have died again. His clothes and hair were matted with blood and he was bleeding for several open wounds where the jagged rocks had been driven into him. He scrambled after his blade, fingers touching it, when she reared up and roared.  
   
Panic fuelled him further and he grabbed hold of the blade. She ran at him. There was no fighting grace in her; no strategy or plan beyond brute strength. He was terrified when she came at him again. He managed to dive out of her reach, managed to get his feet under himself, managed to spin around, blade raised… Her roar made him quiver for a moment before he swung his blade in an arch. The impact made his arms shake in exertion and it was not easy to cut her head off. He had to hack away, while she was screaming in agony, until he managed to sever it. He couldn’t stop sobbing in terror. Sometimes he still wakes up with a start from that memory and wishes he’d had a sharper blade. It had been so senseless, the whole affair.  
   
The head rolled away and he stared at it; her furrowed brow and strangely shaped chin. He trembled violently. The quickening hit him violently and he fell. It hurt when it entered him at first and moaned. Memories flashed, but he couldn’t make sense of them. She had been so old. The prickling sensation of electricity washed over them and he screamed when the last vestiges of her being entered him. It was agony. One moment she was there and the next he’d _eaten_ her being, like a cannibal. Assembled her quickening into himself. She was no more.  
   
He wept. Cradling her body close to him, he’d wept. She had been the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. But he’d destroyed her, because she frightened him so.  
   
He never tells this story to Joe when he asks. He teases the watcher, telling one outrageous story after another while drinking his weight in beer. It is a private memory and one he intends to keep to himself. He doesn’t feel guilty. He knows that it was him or her and he’d rather be alive than she.  
   
In the end she’s just one of a thousand regrets.


End file.
